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I'll see you at the crossroads.

From business to politics to romance, we're ensnared in a web of buzzwords. How to escape?

To borrow from one of our great catchphrases, don't hate the game, hate the player.

The internet pitilessly showcases our problems. For years, we've known that we clog our LinkedIn profiles with alarmingly uniform terms of self-description that vary only mildly across the globe. In Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Eva Illouz revealed just how standardized a vocabulary we use to depict ourselves on internet dating sites: everyone calls themselves "fun." Political journalists, meanwhile, are on the verge of having to declare a war on wars on things. Buzzwords and catchphrases are publicly supplanting our personalities -- at the very moment we seem to hunger for more and more potent confirmations of our own and others' personal authenticity.

What gives? The surprising answer may be lurking between the lines of a few new studies in language and human intimacy.

Paul Zak, of Claremont Graduate University, has spent years researching the influence of oxytocin on behavior we closely associate with good morals. He's discovered an extraordinarily close relation: "to be certain that what we were seeing was true cause and effect, we sprayed synthetic oxytocin into our subjects' nasal passages—a way to get it directly into their brains. Our conclusion: We

could turn the behavioral response on and off like a garden hose."

But rather than prescribing America a daily regimen of oxytocin, Zak makes a crucial connection: "you don't need to shoot a chemical up someone's nose, or have sex with them, or even give them a hug in order to create the surge in oxytocin that leads to more generous behavior." It turns out that "all you have to do is give someone a sign of trust." Intuitively enough, "the feeling of being trusted makes a person more…trustworthy. Which, over time, makes other people more inclined to trust [...]. If you detect th

e makings of an endless loop that can feed back onto itself, creating what might be called a virtuous circle—and ultimately a more virtuous society—you are getting the idea."

That's where words come in. Zak cautions that, "because no one chemical in the body functions in isolation," the creation of virtuous circles depends on "other factors from a person's life experience" as well. Virtuously productive relationships depend on exchanges of trust, but exchanges of trust depend not just on behavior but communication that tees up that behavior. Zak recounts how he "began warning visitors to my lab that before they left, I was going to give them a hug. This scares some people, but I've found that my slightly eccentric announcement changes the depth of the conversation, making it more intimate, more engaging and more valuable to us both." Zak calls this 'forecasting,' but in a less scientific mode, we could learn a lot by calling it what it is -- promising.

The interesting thing about promising is that it always begins with an I. To promise is to declare that I am going to create some new addition to reality. Without the I, there's no promise and no creation (to set aside the

question of the changed status of reality). But -- and here's the kicker -- when we talk to each other, we very rarely use "I" this way -- despite very frequently using "I" to talk about ourselves.